Maine's Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it is using more than $3 million in welfare savings to help elderly Mainers who have been waiting for services.

Some Mainers have been waiting for a long time.

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Gene and Betty LeGrange, of Lewiston, need a little help to get by. Both of them are blind. Once a week since 2007, someone from Catholic Charities has been coming to their apartment to help them with their chores.

"This is a lot easier for us," Gene LeGrange said.

Catholic Charities will now be able to extend home help to about 900 more Mainers. The organization is getting more than one-third of the $3.24 million of welfare savings, the LePage administration announced Monday.

The money is coming from shrinking by half the number of Maine families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families - or TANF- benefits.

Department of Health and Human Services commissioner Mary Mayhew is touting a 60-month TANC cap that was never enforced before the governor took office.

"We'd lost perspective of where our true, core priorities, as an agency, need to be, and those funds are allowing us to truly create that prioritization for our elderly and disabled," Mayhew said.

Critics of the administration said they are pleased to hear that DHHS is spending the savings to help elderly Mainers who have been waiting for services, but Rep. Drew Gattine, a Westbrook Democrat, wonders whether the state should be crowing about the TANF cutbacks.

"They're touting this as some kind of welfare success," Gattine said. "Well, really what they're doing is they're bragging about the fact that they've cut thousands and thousands of children away from access they have to food and utilities to keep them safe and from rent to keep a roof over their head."

Mayhew said the loss of TANF benefits after five years is enough to motivate the parents of those children to find jobs.

"The fact of the matter is, under previous administrations, people were languishing on these programs with no incentive to develop the work skills to get the high school degree in order to move off these programs," Mayhew said.